A Quote by Elif Batuman

The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.

Elif Batuman

Quote Topics

Changed College Criticism Dreams Interpretation Interpretation Of Dreams Most Opinion Read Text Which

Quote Author

Elif Batuman
American - Author
Born: 1977

Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It introduced the notion that there existed certain predictable and identifiable processes by which dreams were formed.

Henry Reed

I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts.

Carl Jung

I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!

Wallace Shawn

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

Fernando Pessoa

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

Billy Collins

The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing -- and fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a difference of quality.

Soren Kierkegaard

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.

Henry David Thoreau

No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

Carl Jung

Everyone has a right to an opinion. I can arrive in England and express my opinion. If criticism were ferocious and without intellectual objectivity they should show me the way to their airport. It is important to have an opinion and not be afraid to express it, knowing there will be criticism.

Jose Mourinho

I'm not naive. Sometimes interpretation is more of an art than a science. There are those who would label interpretation absolutely anything a judge might do or, two, the text of a statute or the Constitution. But it seems to me there comes a point where a judge is using his own creativity and purpose and crosses the line between interpreting a text written by somebody else and in a sense creating something new.

Orrin Hatch

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

Roland Barthes

I don't have a very high opinion, actually, of the world of criticism - or the practice of criticism. I think I admire art criticism, criticism of painting and sculpture, far more than I do that of say films and books, literary or film criticism. But I don't much like the practice. I think there are an awful lot of bad people in it.

Tom Robbins

Mythologies were the earliest dreams of mankind, and in the psychotic delusions of his patients, Jung believed he was encountering those dreams again. Freud, too, believed that the psyche retained archaic vestiges, remnants of our earlier mental world. But for Freud these were a burden we were forced to repress. Jung instead would see them as a reservoir of vital energy, a source of meaning and power from which, through the over-development of our rational minds, modern mankind has become divorced.

Gary Valentine

Certainly professionally, yes [I was interested more in history]. And literary criticism, the structure of poetry. But it is primarily as a historian that I work, although text criticism and literary criticism are very much a part of my interests.

Frank Moore Cross

I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.